I have been thinking a lot about the Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge a couple of weeks ago. His name was Tyler Clementi. A lot of media attention has been focused on the fact that Clementi's roommate had been secretly taping and broadcasting video of his homosexual encounters. A lot of people have focused on the role of technology, the apathy and possible culpability of the roommate...but what about the suicide?
I was thinking today about how difficult it must be for the family to understand how humiliation or embarassment led to this since there is no indication that anything else contributed to Clementi's decision to jump off that bridge. I believe the humiliation was not the catalyst, but it was the tipping point...unfortunately, no one knew how deeply hurt this kid was.
I've been there. Not suicidal, but deeply hurt enough to believe that if I just disappeared, life would go on just fine without me. I felt that way a lot in high school--the cruelest time of my life (actually, middle school was the cruelest, but I hadn't developed the ability to brood about it yet). In high school I was invisible to most of my peers. Actually, they saw me quite clearly, but they determined that I was too young, too weird, too awkward, too unattractive, too eager, too talkative, etc. to be bothered with me.
And that awkwardness followed me to college where I fell into pretty much the same pattern of disconnectedness. I made friends, but we were not close and while they were off dating, I was in my room listening to Prince and Sade. The difference about being away from home was that I did not have a family around to distract me from my peer isolation. Luckily because there is a clique for everyone in college, my loneliness was temporary and I eventually found other friends with whom I connected. But as an adult, I have had recurrent struggles with feeling alone, and I often think that people don't notice.
I feel badly for Tyler Clementi because instead of finding his niche in college, he encountered yet another predator who mocked him at his most vulnerable state. Without knowing more about him, I am sure that Clementi was bullied in high school, but because he had his music and a family to counteract the toxic deluge of teenage ridicule, he built up a fragile immunity to his pain. But once he went away to school, the protective cocoon of family was gone and he just could not see a way out other than to take his life.
What I hope will happen in the aftermath of this tragedy is that other people see and intervene before the darkness obscures the light of living. In my experience, teenage depression is written off as moodiness, but there is an intensity to the darkness that is anything but typical. Teenage angst feeds on insecurity and it is inside that darkness that a person can become vulnerable to the temptation to give up.
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As I think about the darkness that overcame Tyler Clementi, I also thought about the other relevant fact about this tragedy which is the closet. How hard must it be to live a lie because the light of the truth might place a bullseye on your back? Of course, the LGBT folks totally understand that angle of the tragedy, but how much hatred and intolerance we can accept before someone else gets killed? How many people shrugged this incident off because their belief system condones ridicule of homosexuality? I thought about the standing ovation Bishop Eddie Long received when he addressed his congregation and how his extreme stance against homosexuality was essentially defended even as he stands accused of sexual abusing young men. Or how the ridicule and harassment heaped upon another college student in Michigan gets defended as free speech by his boss. Or how a group of protesters will get to argue the indefensible act of protesting homosexuality at the funerals of American soldiers at the Supreme Court.
I am afraid that I know what was in Tyler's head when he jumped...but what about the rest of us when we do not speak up to the bullies of intolerance? Are we just watching more kids like Tyler take the plunge?
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